"Seeking Equality compares economic inequality in the United States and Canada, North American neighbors with much in common--socially, politically, and economically--yet whose contemporary populations are marked by significant differences of material well-being. This book surveys the data and...

A model of occupational choice and human capital investment is developed and tested. The model allows family background to influence occupational choice via access to economic resources, differences in costs of schooling, and ability uncertainty. The model predicts that people are more sensitive...

Bereits in den 50er Jahren begann Ägypten sein Bildungssystem auszuweiten. Folglich konnte das Land über die letzten Jahrzehnte einen erheblichen Bildungsanstieg verzeichnen. Haushaltsdaten zeigen außerdem, dass auch Kinder aus Familien mit niedrigem Bildungsstand von den Investitionen im...

This paper studies parental investment in education and intergenerational earnings mobility for father-son pairs with native and foreign born fathers. We illustrate within a simple model that for immigrants, investment in their children is related to their return migration probability. In our...

Using Norwegian intergenerational data with a substantial part of the life-cycle earnings of children and almost the entire life-cycle earnings for their fathers, we present new estimates of intergenerational mobility. Extending the length of the fathers' earnings windows from 5 to 30 years...

This comparative study of the relationship between family economic background and adult outcomes in the United States and Canada addresses three questions. First, is there something to explain? We suggest that the existing literature finds that there are significant differences in the degree of...

This paper estimates the intergenerational income elasticity for urban China, paying careful attention to the potential biases induced by income fluctuations and life cycle effects. Our preferred estimates are that the intergenerational income elasticities are 0.74 for father-son, 0.84 for...

The intergenerational elasticity of income is considered one of the best measures of the degree to which a society gives equal opportunity to its members. While much research has been devoted to measuring this reduced-form parameter, less is known about its underlying structural determinants....